Carla Presents Anna Karenina and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain

Summer Meeting Seven members and one associate gathered at Christine’s pool on the first day of July. Several members debated whether the pool was the most beautiful they’d ever had the privilege to swim in or among the top three. The view of the Palisades over the infinity pool edge is spectacular.  We are grateful for Christine’s decision to build the pool and host our summer meetings.

 It was a brown bag lunch. Christine made a delicious soup with blueberries from her garden; Carla brought brownies. We were cooling off in the pool when we started to smell, first the delightful odor of ginger cookies baking followed by the perplexing but unmistakable odor of burning. Why? Where? How? Christine noticed smoke coming from a metal bowl on the table with our lunch foods. We’ve all heard the saying so hot you could fry an egg. The sun had heated the metal bowl to oven temperature; it was baking and burning the ginger cookies in it. Another Lit Club first: sun burned cookies.

 Some of us stayed in the pool while we started the more or less official part of the meeting; others relaxed on the lawn. We had no scheduled presentation but Carla wanted to make the one she had to cancel in May.

 We began with book recommendations, here:

·        Flashlight by Susan Choi

·        Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple

·        Death Come for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

·        Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

·        The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

·        The Flight of Icarus by Raymond Queneau

·        Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood: first in the Pentecost and Parker mystery series. Laura recommends all five

Carla’s Presentation Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, Stories and Commentaries by George Saunders

 Carla sent out the following email with a plot summary in the style of Jeff Spurgeon/WQXR’s three minute opera summaries.
In a far-off land and time, a beautiful, aristocratic woman meets a handsome, aristocratic man and they fall in love. But there is no happy ending in sight. She is married to a pompous older man and they have a child. She is shunned by her hypocritical peers - dalliances are accepted, but not blatant affairs. The two leave the country, have a child, then return. Her husband refuses a divorce and she becomes increasingly distraught and doubtful of her lover and kills herself by throwing herself under a train. Her lover mourns her and then rejoins his regiment. 

 Carla noted that lots more happens, after all, this is Tolstoy, there will be 817 pages of realism and psychological depth.

 In addition to the novel itself, Carla drew on George Saunder’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. Saunders used seven Russian short stories to teach a writing course. Two of Tolstoy’s stories served as studies. Milan Kundera noted that Tolstoy as a writer was not a “spokesman for his own ideas.” Fortunately for us, his readers, because in middle age he began to have some fairly eccentric, contradictory ideas for an owner of a large estate and father of 13. His characters live their lives, not his, although Anna Karenina’s Levin was, according to Tolstoy’s wife Sonya, a self-portrait.

 Tolstoy’s biography could have been written by one of the great 19^th century novelists. He was a wealthy aristocrat, born in 1828. Orphaned young, he was raised by older women relatives. Home schooled, he went briefly to a university, then enlisted in the Russian Army. There, he was distinguished for his drinking, gambling and womanizing. None of this was an impediment to his writing. He earned critical acclaim with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, published 1852-1864, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. In the 1870’s, he experienced a spiritual crisis. He embraced poverty, chastity, pacifism, vegetarianism, social reform, anarchism. Chastity came after fathering 13 children. Despite the vow of poverty, he kept his large estate. We can only imagine the family conflicts that followed. His wife, Sonya, wrote in her diary that Tolstoy was no moral-ethical giant, this in the time she was living with a chaste vegetarian. In 1910, he fled his home in the chill of winter; he died of heart failure and pneumonia, at a railway station.   

 Anna Karenina was written at the most important turning point in Tolstoy’s life. We plunged into readings from the novel after a swim in Christine’s pool. Both were refreshing; the wintry scenes of love and betrayal in Russia and being poolside or in it. Contrast heightens perception. I can’t say more about the plot than Carla’s three-minute synopsis, except it passes over Tolstoy’s prose, impressively rendered in a new translation by husband wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The line inscribed in our memories is at the beginning: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

 Respectfully submitted,

Frances Greenberg, Recording Secretary